CULTURE
WRECK THIS JOURNAL
WRECK words | Jodie Sheppard
G
allery was intrigued when Bex Archer contacted us about her hobby, ‘Wreck This Journal’. Bex does a lot of craft and art journaling which varies from scrap booking and art journals to making jewellery!
How did you become interested in art journaling? I’m very interested in photography and photographing my own work so I can make a visual diary of what I do myself; I often share these images on Flickr also. I am quite creative and also design and create my own jewellery, I am trying to get an online shop going for my brand Kawai. How did you come about Wreck This Journal? I have a lot of pen friends and art journal contacts who I keep in contact with and one of the ladies, Kerry Smith, is actually the author of ‘Wreck This Journal’. I was one of the first people she sent a copy of the journal to have a go at in 2006 and I have been addicted ever since! What is Wreck This Journal all about? I actually did my own art journals before this; however a lot of people hadn’t heard of an art journal or knew where to start. With ‘Wreck This Journal’, there are a lot of prompts on each page and it gives you an idea what to do; some people don’t go by the rules they just completely ignore it and do what they think and interpret the book themselves – I sometimes add extra pages to mine. Where do you get your materials from to create the journals? Well to be honest nearly all of it is junk! Some pages in the book I have found stuff from the garden, other pages I have been clearing out and thought ‘I’ll keep that just in case’ and it has always come in handy. One page actually has chewed up gum and well, this is sad, I collected garbage cards from the 80’s when I was little. I put chewing gum actually from 1986 in there, so it really is all sorts of junk. I don’t like throwing things away so it really comes in handy. Does Wreck This Journal go through different trends? Yeah, the main thing at the moment with them is making them as fat as you, that is a huge deal at the moment with the community on Flickr. The thing is with mine, I change my style all the time and when I look back at it I think ‘I wouldn’t have done that now’, so it is constantly changing - I already want a new one! I’ve got three of the ‘Wreck This Journal’ and three of the ‘Mess Books’ which is the other one that I really enjoy. The thing is it takes so long to finish one, but I’m not going to let myself buy another until I’ve at least finished one, as I’ve got three on the go. I get so many ideas for them all the time; you just want to do more and more. Do you think you have helped inspire other people by sharing photos of your journals on Flickr? I share a lot of my images on Flickr and if you Google ‘Wreck This Journal’ a lot of my photos come up, I have thousands of views on just the ‘Wreck This Journal’ album and lots of positive comments.
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GUERNSEY’S STYLE MAGAZINE